HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy, Jr, announced his plan to remove all 17 current members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the CDC advisory panel that advises on vaccine schedules. The nice editors at The Wall Street Journal have termed this a “not-so-clean sweep.” They rationalize their characterization in large part with this:
Mr Kennedy’s beef seems to be that the committee’s members know something about vaccines and may have been involved in their research and development. “Most of ACIP’s members have received substantial funding from pharmaceutical companies, including those marketing vaccines,” he writes.
Some members have been paid by vaccine makers—typically sums less than their salaries—to assist with clinical trials in which they help evaluate the vaccines for safety and efficacy.
I’ll ignore the opening bit of disingenuous snark. I’ll leave aside the naïve belief that folks, including government bureaucrats, are immune to chump change bribes. These editors should know better than that. Instead, look at the facts included in the snippet: some committee members being involved in the R&D of the vaccines on which they now advise in the name of the government, and some members having been paid by vaccine makers. That many of the studies in which those then-paid members were involved were double-blind is irrelevant: those members were paid by vaccine makers, and now those members advise on those vaccines.
These are clear conflicts of interest, and even the august editors of the WSJ should be able to understand that.
The editors did point out that current members have recused themselves from considerations in which they (think they) have a conflict of interest. Such recusals, though, always are judgment calls on the part of the bureaucrat considering his own recusal. There’s no need for such judgment calls when there are no conflicts of interest.
In an ideal world, such conflicts—large or small—would have no influence on government-advising bureaucrats. In that ideal world, we would have no need for conflict of interest rules. We live in the real world, however, and Kennedy is entirely correct to seek to reduce as far as may be the existence of such conflicts. It’s much too early in the process to begin criticizing his move, even a knee-jerk beef triggered by it being an RFK, Jr, move.
In the end, Kennedy has appointed eight members to the revamped ACIP:
- Joseph R. Hibbeln, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who worked in nutritional neurosciences at the National Institutes of Health.
- Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist who used to work at Harvard Medical School.
- Retsef Levi, a professor of operations management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management.
- Robert Malone, a biochemist who helped with early research of mRNA vaccine technology.
- Cody Meissner, a professor of pediatrics at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth and former ACIP member.
- James Pagano, an emergency medicine physician with 40 years of clinical experience.
- Vicky Pebsworth, the Pacific region director of the National Association of Catholic Nurses, who previously sat on the Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee.
- Michael Ross, a clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at George Washington University and Virginia Commonwealth University.